In his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” T. S. Eliot declared the play an artistic failure, radically dismissing one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Eliot coins the term objective correlative in this essay and asserts that Hamlet lacks a strong objective correlative to cohere the play’s actions.

Sigmund Freud, interestingly, views Hamlet’s fixation on Gertrude, his mother, as the axis on which the play turns. It doesn’t take years of Freudian analysis to determine that Hamlet has a fixation on his mother, nor that his uncle’s fratricide and subsequent marriage to his dead brother’s wife is incestuous even by modern terms. Yet, the Old Testament gives the injunction for a man to take up with his dead brother’s wife.

Let’s begin this discussion with an evaluation of Hamlet’s relationship to his mother. Does he have an untoward interest in her affairs?

LTRE 421 DeVry Week 4 Discussion 2

The Elizabethan Context (graded)

Hamlet is, ultimately, a revenge tragedy. In a revenge tragedy, the convention is to have all the major characters (and many of the minor ones) dead on stage by the end. The Elizabethans even used animal organs, guts, and blood to make the action realistic. Does the ambition of revenge motifs have any relevance for modern society and the art that reflects our own culture?

Let’s also consider Ophelia and Gertrude as the only female characters in this play. What is Shakespeare telling his audience about women through these characters? How might Queen Elizabeth have reacted to Shakespeare’s view of women? Did Queen Elizabeth perceive herself to be a woman, or was she, as a monarch, “without gender”?